


Still Afloat

by Dira Sudis (dsudis)



Category: Generation Kill
Genre: Community: cottoncandy_bingo, M/M, Painplay, Sunburn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-25
Updated: 2012-09-25
Packaged: 2017-11-15 00:17:06
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,179
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/521023
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dsudis/pseuds/Dira%20Sudis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <em>He flicks a fingernail against the center of Nate's chest, and Nate's whole body jerks from the zing of bright, prickling pain.</em>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Still Afloat

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to Iulia for beta!
> 
> This story is for the Sunburn square on my cottoncandy_bingo card.

His destination is a two-hour drive from the airport, and even that isn't enough time to acclimate Nate to the change. He woke up in Boston in the last gray dregs of lingering winter, surrounded by the wreckage his apartment had descended into during mid-terms; now he's in a pristine rental car running the air conditioning, sun pounding down on him as it sinks toward the brilliantly blue ocean. It feels like one of those dreams he still has pretty regularly about being back in Iraq or Afghanistan, back at Pendleton or Quantico, except that the anticipation thrumming through him is nothing like the confused anxiety of those dreams. He knows who's waiting for him when he gets to the beach, and he knows what he'll do when he gets there.

Nate parks the rental next to Brad's truck and gets out to stretch and survey the terrain. There are a half-dozen other vehicles in the lot, a few people sitting on the beach and a handful of surfers and swimmers in the water. He picks out Brad at a glance--he's wearing plain black board shorts and his board itself is invisible in the water, but Nate would know that body anywhere. He ducks into the rental and gets his shorts out of his bag, changing quickly in the shelter between his vehicle and Brad's.

He walks straight into the water without hesitating--the coolness of the water is nothing compared to March in New England--and throws himself under when it's deep enough to swim. The salt stings his eyes and the waves give him something to fight. He's awake and alert, every sense almost overloaded, but he's still not entirely clearheaded. The feeling of unreality doesn't improve when he sticks his head up to look around and Brad is right there, hanging on the edge of his board and grinning brightly at Nate.

Nate grins back as he paddles over, catching the near edge of the board and looking at Brad across it. Brad is tanned and smiling, and under the water his feet brush up against Nate's, an invisible substitute for the way they can't greet each other in public. 

"You look like _shit_ ," Brad says cheerfully. "What are they doing to you in Boston?"

"Winter, mostly," Nate says, and realizes he's seriously contemplating pillowing his head on Brad's surfboard. "And exams."

"None of those here," Brad assures him firmly. "It's all sun, sand, and surf. Maybe some sleep."

"Maybe," Nate agrees, thinking of what might keep them up all night, right before a wave swamps them. They both come up laughing, but Nate lets go of the board and says, "I'm gonna go work on my tan. Carry on, Sergeant."

Brad grins again and pulls himself up onto the board, heading back out as Nate swims to shore. Nate finds Brad's gear and sits down beside it, leaning back on his hands to enjoy the heat of the sand beneath him and the sun overhead. He even relishes the itchy prickle of salt on his skin as the water evaporates. 

He looks out into the dazzle of the water, watching Brad, and hardly notices when squinting into the sun turns to closing his eyes against it. He hears the cars going by on the road behind him, hears other people on the beach talking and moving around, the occasional yells from surfers. He always opens his eyes when it's Brad, always waves back when Brad waves to him. He's not sleeping, but his brain whirs down into an unfamiliar silence after the last frantic weeks of study and concentration and planning. He's here. All he has to do now is be right here.

Nate opens his eyes when Brad comes out of the water, and he tilts his head up to watch Brad approach, conveniently blocking the sun once he gets close. Brad looks amused again. 

"Your situational awareness is fucking shot."

Nate raises his eyebrows. "I clocked you five yards away and you're about the least hostile person I know."

"Yeah," Brad agrees, grounding his board and then crouching beside it, dropping down to Nate's level so that Nate has to squint again. "But you didn't clock this anytime in the last hour."

He flicks a fingernail against the center of Nate's chest, and Nate's whole body jerks from the zing of bright, prickling pain; Nate looks down and realizes he's picked up a lurid pink sunburn down his whole chest. He snorts a laugh, looking down at himself, and then looks up and meets Brad's eyes and laughs harder. Brad just shakes his head, putting his face in one hand, but he's laughing too. When Nate falls back onto his elbows and can't catch his breath, Brad shifts onto his knees and grabs Nate's wrist. 

"Come on," he says, as Nate allows himself to be hauled up to his feet, "let's get you indoors."

The place where they're staying--Brad had assured him by text message that morning that the term "resort" did not apply no matter what the website said, and even "hotel" was pushing it--is only a few hundred yards away. Brad puts his board in the truck and retrieves Nate's bag from the car, and then leads Nate down the road on foot. Nate closes his eyes when their door is in sight, letting Brad's presence one step ahead guide him until they stop. He moves again when Brad does, without a word or a touch having to pass between them.

Nate opens his eyes when he moves into cooler air. He's almost blind indoors after the blazing brightness outside, and suddenly more conscious of the heat of his sunburn. Brad closes the door and locks it, and Nate steps in as he's turning around. Brad's shoulder scrapes across Nate's chest, and Nate's breath has stopped at the flash of pain even before they kiss. Brad's hands close gently on Nate's upper arms, holding him back so they don't touch more, but it's been too long and Nate's not going to stop kissing Brad for the sake of a stupid sunburn. 

Brad obviously loses track of what he's doing after a while, because he tugs Nate closer, and that stings badly enough that Nate flinches a little, breaking the kiss to gasp. 

Brad pushes him back, and now when Nate looks around he can see the little space they've got for the rest of the week: two beds, a tiny dinette table blocking the path into the tiny kitchenette, open door to the bathroom they will definitely not both fit into at the same time, curtains firmly drawn over the windows. 

Brad lets go of Nate's arms, giving him a gentle push toward the beds. "Go lie down."

Nate shoves his shorts off--they're sandy, and there's no point getting more sand in the bed than he has to, though he's sure they'll feel like they're sleeping on the beach by the end of the week--and walks across the room naked. He turns when he gets to the further bed. Brad is just standing by the door, watching, with his fingers hooked into his own shorts. Nate sits down and sprawls, spreading his legs wide. His dick starts to fill under Brad's gaze, even as the lassitude of the quiet, dim room and the soft bed under him weigh him down. 

He sees Brad seeing it, the way Brad's smile widens and his shorts stay on. 

"Stay right there a minute," Brad says, and Nate gives in and closes his eyes.

* * *

Brad waits a couple of minutes, just staring; even with half of him painted a startling pink by the sunburn, he can't get enough of seeing Nate like this, unhesitatingly exposed to him. Nate doesn't slip down from where he's propped on his elbows--doesn't actually fall asleep--so Brad figures that as quiet and pliant and dazed as he seems between the jetlag and the sunburn and midterms devouring his brain, he's not actually completely gone. Brad tears his gaze away and goes over to the kitchenette, gets a bottle of water, and crosses back to Nate. He steps between Nate's knees, and Nate doesn't twitch a muscle. 

Brad is fascinated by this thing Nate can do, relaxing like this, letting himself be vulnerable. He knows he should see it as a weakness--Nate going soft and civilian--but he knows it's not that at all. Nate was recon; Nate will always be a Marine. That doesn't go away. And yet Nate can turn it off, can let go like this, at least in Brad's presence. He likes to think that it's purely an observer effect--that this isn't just something that only he gets to see, but that he's necessary to this, that no one else ever _could_ see Nate this way. 

Nate is perfectly still, stretched out before him, a stark line cutting across his hips where his sunburn ends, his dick lying down beneath his pale thighs. He's still got his arms under him, he's holding his head up, but his eyes stay closed, his breath stays slow, and there's no tension in him at all, no anticipation. 

Brad tucks the bottle of water under his arm and pushes his shorts down and off with one hand; they hit the ground with a wet thump that's clearly audible in the silence of their little vacation shack. Nate smiles slightly, but he doesn't tense, doesn't move, doesn't look. Brad leans over, holding out the bottle of water, and Nate has to sense the approach--has to know enough to be self-protective, with his skin burned and tender--but he doesn't twitch until Brad is holding the bottle half an inch away from his skin and a drop of condensation falls onto the center of his chest.

Nate's whole body goes tight for an instant--his knees press in against Brad's--and he opens his eyes. His smile doesn't falter, and he relaxes again as he speaks. "I can't tell if that feels good or not."

"How about this?" Brad asks, watching Nate's face as he eases the bottle itself down against Nate's skin. It feels cold enough in his fingers; it has to be icy against the heat of Nate's burned skin. 

Nate's breath hitches, and his eyelashes flutter, but his eyes stay fixed on Brad's. Brad rolls the bottle against Nate's skin, leaving a faint sheen of condensation-wetness on his skin, and Nate shudders under it but still doesn't pull away. 

"Yeah," he says, his voice going shaky. 

Brad lifts the bottle away and sees the track of it linger for a moment, a white line on Nate's skin refilling with red. He touches Nate again with the bottom of the bottle, drawing a line from his collarbones all the way down, until the bottle is dripping on Nate's pubes. Nate lets his head fall back, but it's impossible to miss the way he's squirming under it now, nipples tight and dick half-hard. 

Brad drops the bottle next to Nate's hip and Nate looks up again. Brad splays out his fingers--wet and cold from the bottle, but not wet or cold enough to feel anywhere near the same--and leans in slowly. Nate's breath starts to come faster, and his eyes follow Brad's hand in all the way, until Brad's pressing his handprint into the center of Nate's chest. 

Nate lets out a little half-pained grunt, almost the exact noise he makes sometimes when Brad pushes into him fast, not gentle but exactly what they both need, and Brad realizes that he's getting hard, too. Brad lifts his hand away and stares at the mark he's left on Nate, watches it disappear again. 

"Come here," Nate says abruptly, scooting back onto the bed but hooking one foot behind Brad's knee as he does. Brad follows Nate's lead, kneeling on the bed between his spread legs as Nate makes room for him. This makes it easier to lean over him, to rub his fingers curiously over Nate's nipples, which aren't usually especially interesting to either of them but now make Nate arch off the bed, gasping. His touch there doesn't leave marks, though, and he moves on quickly. He draws short-lived lines and spirals on Nate, traces the lines of his ribs and watches them disappear again into blood-flushed skin. He listens to Nate gasp and moan until Nate grabs Brad's wrist and shoves it downward. 

Nate is hard, and gets harder as Brad starts jerking him off; Brad's own dick twitches in sympathy. He's fully hard now himself, aching for the same attention, but he can wait. He can't resist curling down over Nate, brushing his lips lightly over sensitive red skin. He can feel the fever-heat that radiates off it, every little twitch of reaction from Nate at even the lightest touch. 

Nate's hand settles on the back of his head, holding him down, and Brad drags his teeth down Nate's breastbone. Nate growls a drawn out, " _Fuck_ ," as his fingers dig into the back of Brad's head, and Brad licks an apology along the same path. Nate is bucking under him, pushing up frantically into his hand, and Brad has to see this.

He straightens up on his knees and watches his hand working over Nate's cock, looks at the darker-red marks he's left in a couple of places on Nate's sunburn, the way Nate's whole face is flushed brighter than the little bit of burn on his nose and cheeks. Nate's not looking sleepy anymore, his eyes bright and focused, his mouth hanging open as every movement of Brad's hand derails the next thing he might try to say. 

Nate pushes himself half upright and Brad drops down to sit on his heels, reducing the distance; he has to let go of Nate for a few seconds while Nate rearranges his legs, and then Nate is straddling his thighs and hauling him into a kiss. Brad closes his free arm around Nate's back, digging in a little with his fingernails as he gets his other hand back to Nate's cock. They're pressed together so closely that Brad's arm is trapped between them, so that every stroke of his hand on Nate's cock rubs his arm against Nate's sunburned belly. Nate lasts through maybe a minute of that, all breathless biting kisses and radiating heat, before he comes over Brad's fingers with a last hissed string of obscenities.

Brad holds him there for another minute, licking softer kisses against his mouth as he goes quiet and slack again. Nate's hold on him gentles, and Nate kisses back, his body going heavier in Brad's grip as more of his weight settles onto Brad's thighs. Brad's still hard between them, and he can't resist pushing into the incidental friction of Nate's body against his.

Nate tilts his head, taking his mouth away from Brad's; for a few disappointed seconds Brad thinks Nate has just checked out completely. He should know better, though. Nate would never leave him hanging like that, and sure enough Nate's only swaying back far enough to look down between their bodies. Nate keeps his left arm locked around the back of Brad's neck and reaches down to tug Brad's hand off of Nate's cock.

He gets come all over his fingers before he closes them on Brad, messy and hot and slick, and Brad makes a helpless noise and has to look away. Nate's shoulder is right there, and Brad leans in, licking along the boundary of Nate's sunburn. It occurs to him vaguely that you could calculate the exact angle Nate was leaning at, from the elevation of the sun in the sky and the exact edge of the sunburn at the top of Nate's shoulder. But Nate's skin is hot under his tongue and Nate makes an incoherent little noise at the touch and jerks him harder, and the sloppy sound of Nate's hand and the jolt of pleasure makes Brad jerk up under him. 

Nate rides him expertly, so Brad can't resist trying his teeth on Nate's shoulder, driving Nate on. Nate's hand keeps working on him, his weight holding Brad here, his grip on the back of Brad's neck pushing him to keep trying his mouth against Nate's sunburn. It's the best kind of struggle, and Brad can feel the end--win and loss all at once--coiling up through his body for a few breathtaking, teetering seconds before he's crashing into Nate. 

His breath cuts off like always--too many years of habitual, careful silence--and Nate makes wordless encouraging noises into a kiss until Brad breaks away to gasp. He has to look up to meet Nate's eyes, and Nate is heavy-lidded and pleased, and says, "Fair warning, I'm going to pass the fuck out on you now."

* * *

Nate is exaggerating slightly, but he allows himself to release his grip, and is entirely unsurprised when Brad holds on to him, easing him down to the bed. Nate keeps his eyes open just enough to keep watching the way Brad grins at him, bright and open and at ease in the way that he gets after he comes. Nate figures he's got about five minutes before something prompts Brad to get control of himself, and then the smile will become a deliberate thing, something he chooses to show to Nate. Nate loves to see Brad make that choice, but seeing Brad actually careless is rarer.

Brad leans over him for a few more soft, lazy kisses. He doesn't touch, now, which is good because Nate's entire front is tingling and oversensitive, with a few spots of real pain. The sex was worth it--that fascinated, absorbed look on Brad's face was worth it, even without the strange cross-wired pleasure of it--but Nate's not sure how he'll get a shirt on for the next couple of days. Of course, if they just have to stay in for a few days....

Brad straightens up and turns away, and Nate tries folding his arms behind his head--which makes the tops of his shoulders flare with pain--and then just lies still, watching. Water runs in the bathroom, and Brad comes back a minute later with a washcloth and a bottle of something blue. Nate lets his eyes fall closed as Brad sits down beside him, and twitches only a little when Brad cleans him up.

There's a cold, wet touch on his chest that opens Nate's eyes, and when he looks up Brad's smile has shrunk into wry amusement, but the light in his eyes is still bright as the sun and nearly as dangerous. Brad waves the bottle at him and spreads the gel carefully across Nate's skin.

"It has lidocaine," Brad says, his smile widening. "You'll be feeling no pain pretty soon, and you can definitely come out surfing tomorrow."

Nate groans and tries to pull away across the bed, but Brad catches him with another kiss, and Nate surrenders unconditionally.


End file.
